Miners in the Sky (7 page)

She tried to match his calm. “Haney?”

“He’s the man who offered to take the two of us to your brother, and then bring all three of us back next pickup-ship time,” said Dunne evenly. “He’s my best guess. Here come the bazooka-shells.”

He watched without apparent concern. Infinitely tiny rocket trails leaped toward the lifeboat. They went past, astern. One missed by hundreds of yards only. The others were more widely out of line.

“It’s not easy to shoot at an accelerating or decelerating target,” said Dunne detachedly. “You can’t figure out how much to lead.”

He went back to his subject. “When I didn’t take up those very kindly offers,” he said with the same detachment, “he offered to take you alone. I should have killed him then. But I was thinking about your brother and my smashed-up ship. I didn’t realize how completely he’d given himself away.”

“I didn’t know he gave—”

“He was the only one, the only man,” said Dunne, “who didn’t believe I’d found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. He took my word that I hadn’t found it. He offered a bargain he’d never have thought of if he believed I’d found it. So he must have known what Keyes and I had. I should have killed him,” repeated Dunne reflectively. “I simply didn’t think of it in time. Too bad!”

He stripped off the space-suit and put it away.

“I’m going to give you a lesson in ship-handling,” he said. “If you can drive while I act as artillery from the airlock door, we’ve a better chance of living.”

He sat her at the control board and began to instruct her in such maneuvers as might be needed in a fire-fight or in the Rings. He could use only one airlock at a time from which to aim a bazooka. That necessarily left one side of the ship unarmed. He showed her how to rotate the lifeboat to swing the airlock to the other side. He showed her how to swing the ship to allow for bazooka fire directly ahead and directly astern. He showed her evasive tactics that sometimes worked when bazooka shells were flashing about through space.

She accepted the lessons with what he felt was a fine yet unhappy resolution. But he was giving her lessons to keep her from thinking of Keyes, just then. Something had become evident to him, and he was trying to keep her from thinking of it. The thing was that his donkeyship had been destroyed to keep him from getting back to Keyes. To desire such a thing, somebody had to know where Keyes was. In fact, it looked as if someone had killed Keyes and wanted Dunne out of the way—whether killed or marooned—while the rock Keyes was guarding r, was worked out, cleaned up, finished.

So Dunne taught Nike how to handle the ship so that she’d be too busy to reason out how likely it was that her brother might already be dead.

She spoke suddenly, and not of the lesson in progress.

“You said,” she observed, for no apparent reason, “that a man lives only three years on an average in the Rings. How long have you been here?”

“Two,” said Dunne. “Your brother and I have done pretty well. If we can clean up this last rock we’ve found, he should be urged to quit.”

“I’ll urge him,” said Nike. “There are only the two of us. Where were you before you came out to the Rings?”

“Here and there,” said Dunne.

He went over the instruments. He peered at the outer universe. He nodded.

Now the lifeboat headed back toward the Rings; and most of the donkeyships awakened to the fact that Dunne intended to get them out of listening range of his drive by a maneuver not unlike “cracking the whip” on ice. But they’d lost ground, and some of them could only follow the chase by following ships that followed ships that could pick up the lifeboat’s humming drive. Ahead of the lifeboat lay that golden fog which was the Rings. It looked like a solid, unimaginable wall against which anything solid might dash itself to pieces. But it wasn’t solid. It was the Rings. And now as the lifeboat was about to plunge in, there were wisps and tendrils of what looked like vapor but were actually dust clouds.

The stars behind the lifeboat faded as mistiness encompassed it. The boat went on into the cloud-stuff.

There an odd thing happened. The communicator reported the whining noise of donkeyship drives, and soft rustling whispers and very faint cracklings. All these sounds had their proper explanations. But now it reported a new sound entirely. There was an uncanny, monotonous, “
tweet… tweet… tweet
.” It was unearthly; It was weird. It was unbelievable that twitterings like those of a flying bird should be heard by the communicator in a lifeboat in the Rings.

“What’s that?” asked Nike uneasily. “It sounds queer!”

It stopped. And now the ship was deep in the mist. Dunne swung the ship. On full acceleration it shot ahead. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty… Dunne cut off the drive. There was nothing to be seen through the viewports but sunlit mistiness. The radar reported something moving away to the left. It was not visible. Dunne cut off the radar.

And then the lifeboat went floating onward, masked against sight by the mist of the Rings, hidden against hearing by the cutting of its drive and even its radar, and concealed against discovery by the abandonment of every means by which it could discover its own danger. It floated in the fog, the mist, the haze. There were other solid objects floating in the same obscurity. Some of them were stones from the surface of long-shattered moons. Some were rocks from deeper strata. Some were metal masses.

“We’re drifting,” said Dunne in a dry voice. “We’re not driving. We’re not using our radar or doing anything to distinguish us from any piece of floating rock hereabouts. Our admiring followers ought to plunge into the Rings with radars working and communicators listening for any sign of life. But they’ll hear each other, and their radars will detect each other, and they’ll be considerably confused. It’ll be some time before they think of looking for something floating around with an orbital velocity that isn’t the right one for something out here.”

Nike looked at him strangely. “What was that queer noise?”

“I don’t know,” said Dunne. “Nobody knows. It’s been heard before. Back at the pickup ship there was a man named Smithers who insists it’s gooks. Unfortunately there’s no other evidence for the existence of gooks.”

The air-freshener began to whirr. Dunne cut it off. There was only silence in the lifeboat. Outside, in the mist, donkeyships hunted for it. They had been outfitted very carefully to detect masses of rock or metal floating suspended in emptiness. They had been designed to discover solid objects in just this filmy glowing haze. And the lifeboat was a solid object. If it remained still, it would have been possible for the hunters to examine every fair-sized floating object in a hundred cubic miles, or a thousand, or ten thousand, and very certainly find it. But it was moving. And unless it was detected by its motion, after so long, ten thousand cubic miles of space could contain it anywhere; and after so much more time it could be anywhere in a hundred thousand cubic miles. Ultimately, its motion could have taken it anywhere within a million cubic miles of emptiness—all of which would have to be searched to be sure of finding it.

In the lifeboat there was silence. The radar didn’t hunt for anything. The communicator didn’t report anything. The lifeboat drifted on the course and at the speed it had possessed when Dunne had turned off all equipment. It was self-blinded and self-deafened. All Dunne could do was wait.

But it was nerve-racking to know that at any instant one of his pursuers might blunder on the lifeboat or that it might collide with one of the Ring-fragments it was the purpose of men in the Rings to mine. The feeling was of blind and helpless suspense, with no way to know if it had been discovered within the past half-second. It could not even find out whether its now-raging pursuers were within yards of it or searching futilely hundreds of miles away.

If it were found and challenged, it would not hear the challenge. It wouldn’t know of threats. At any instant an angry spaceman; yards only from the lifeboat, might carry out a threat to destroy it. A bazooka shell could detonate against its hull now, or now, or now, because it did not answer threats or promises.

Nike swallowed. Then she said unsteadily, “This feels queer!”

Dunne nodded. He said drily, “It’s a nasty feeling. They know we’re somewhere in the Rings. They know we’re coasting. But they’ve no idea in what direction or how fast. And every one of them is scouring space for us alone. They’re not cooperating. They don’t trust each other. They can’t. Here in the Rings it isn’t possible to be a pleasant character. We’re here to get rich before we’re killed. We may be killed by accident, or by somebody who wants something we’ve got. If we do get rich, it may be by accident, or by taking something somebody else has got. We’re not nice people, here in the Rings!”

She moistened her lips. “My brother said something about it. But he made it seem like—adventure. Danger, yes, but thrills. And he said that you—”

“He was trying to keep you from worrying,” Dunne said in the same dry tone. “So he praised me. But a man doesn’t live long in the Rings if he practices many of the virtues. If every man here were, noble and self-sacrificing and helpful to the rest, it would be a very nice business. But put one cutthroat among the lot of us, and we all have to turn cutthroat in self-defense. So we’re a pack of scoundrels.”

The lifeboat floated on. Nothing happened. Outside, in the mist, many donkeyships blundered about trying to make something happen. They sheered off from each other’s drive-fields because they did not want to find each other, but the lifeboat. Hours went by. Two. Four. Ten. Sixteen.

“H-hadn’t we better—listen?” asked Nike. “To see if there is anybody—?”

“No,” said Dunne. “This is not pleasant, though I’m getting used to it. But they won’t think we could possibly wait this long without trying to find out how we stand in the chase. That’s why we have to do it.”

Again there was silence and stress and unrelieved tension. The inside of the spaceboat was brightly lighted. There were no viewports in the cabin section. There was nothing that needed to be done. There was nothing that could be done except wait. And waiting was a horrible, unending strain. The lifeboat had undoubtedly appeared as a blip on more than one radar screen among the searching donkeyships. But it radiated nothing. It merely floated in shining emptiness. So far they’d disregarded it. But if any other ship came near enough, it could be seen through the mist. If it were seen, angry men would demand that Dunne lead the way immediately to the Big Rock Candy Mountain—or die. And he couldn’t lead them there.

There was one alternate possible happening, though. Haney might blunder within the distance in which the lifeboat could be seen visually. He’d not waste time demanding anything. He’d destroy the lifeboat while they did not even know he was near.

Twenty hours after Dunne had cut off all contact with the cosmos outside the lifeboat’s hull, Nike said nervously, “Certainly it wouldn’t do any harm to look out the viewports!”

“No harm,” agreed Dunne. “But very little good.”

Nike went into the control room. She looked out each of the ports in turn. She saw nothing but the featureless dust-mist outside. Perhaps she could see half a mile, but she couldn’t tell. There was nothing on which to focus one’s eyes. The rings were unsubstantial. There was nothing real to look at. The haze was so completely uniform that the viewports might have been closed by blankets-lighted from behind-in contact with their transparent plastic. It was as nerve-racking as a blindfold would have been. It seemed that at any instant some dark shape must appear, swimming through the fog…

She went back to the main cabin, shivering.

“It’s—awful,” she said shakily.

“You could get used to it,” Dunne told her. “You’re already used to things you couldn’t have imagined on the way to Outlook. The thing is, you can adjust—even to being scared.”

She stared at him. “I can’t imagine you frightened!”

“Say, uncomfortable, then,” he told her. “The longer we stay undiscovered, the better our chances of staying undiscovered. I think the odds are well in our favor, now.”

She was silent. He looked at his watch.

“In an hour I’ll try listening in on the universe,” he said. “If there’s nothing to hear, I think we can go about our business. We’ll have lost our trailers. And, as it happens, I
think
we’re not too far from where we’re bound.”

“You mean we can go and get my brother?”

He nodded. But he did not look at her. “We can try.”

“And then—he can go back to Horus with me?”

“If you want to try it in this lifeboat. I wouldn’t like to try it—without extra supplies. It’s a long run. A lot depends on how many crystals he’s found. The next pickup ship would be a better way to travel. I pretty well cleaned our account with the Minerals Commission to get this boat. If your trouble calls for money—”

“I don’t know what it calls for,” said Nike unhappily. “I have to ask him.”

Dunne nodded grimly. He began to pace up and down the cabin of the lifeboat. There was much more room here than in a donkeyship. But a donkeyship was built for highly special work in a highly special environment. The mining of abyssal crystals from their gray matrix required operations quite unlike the proper demands on a space-liner’s lifeboats.

The hour he’d mentioned went by. It seemed to last for centuries. Then Dunne went into the control room. He looked out the viewports, without expectation. He flipped on the communicator. Moments later, he turned on the radar.

He saw nothing but mist out the viewports. The radar showed nothing especially menacing. The communicator picked up only appropriate sounds, faint rustling sounds that came by short-wave from the sun. Small, crackling, crashing sounds considered to be lightning bolts in the atmosphere of the planet Thothmes. That was all.

No. There was a faint series of sounds from the speaker. They weren’t drive-noises. They were musical. The effect was eerie. The sounds were barely audible, monotonous, “
tweet… tweet… tweet
…”

They stopped abruptly. Nike barely whispered. “That’s the same sound…”

“Supposedly,” said Dunne, “it’s the noise of a gook ship, creeping about the Rings to spy on us men and snipe at us when the chance comes.” He added humorously, “Anyhow, that’s supposed to be the reason donkeyships sometimes vanish without explanation.”